It was reported in the Enemy Paper the other day that White Bear Lake is shrinking because of the demands on the Prairie du Chien aquifer that lies beneath it. It was a good report, complete with a graphic that showed the porous foundation of sand and gravel on which the lake sits.

Most disturbingly, Molly Shodeen, a hydrologist for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, was quoted as saying, "I think White Bear Lake is reaching a new normal."

Kind of like our economy.

Well, I suppose if you live on the lake, the words "new normal" might constitute fighting words. The new normal is unacceptable, but as an amateur observer, I am afraid Shodeen is probably right.

In what was once water, a resident removes a boat from the extended beachfront at White Bear Lake last fall. (Pioneer Press: Chris Polydoroff)

And whom to fight? What we do know now is that the lake's poor health apparently has less to do with the absence of rain and snow than it does the increased pumping of water in surrounding communities for watering lawns and washing your hands and getting a drink from the tap and so on.

In other words, the old-timers -- and we are running out of old-timers -- who have kept up a good cheer and a belief that the lake will bounce back are having their intuitions debunked by the grave science of the thing. A shallow shore lake, sitting in a small watershed, is slowly draining because White Bear and nine surrounding communities have used 6 billion gallons of water out of the aquifer in 2008, apparently the most recent year for such figures.

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In 1980, 2.6 billion gallons were used.

And if we are still hoping for nature to make up the difference, it would require rainfall 4 inches above average every year just to stop the shrinking or hold it where it is.

Now, we are an inventive people, and I am sure that there are groups of alarmed property owners meeting in emergency who have plans to do something, but what remains unclear. Pull in water from the Mississippi River? A new wastewater-treatment plant in that neck of the woods, with the treated water pumped back into the lake? There goes your jewel, which in White Bear's case has always meant clean. It has always been a remarkably clean lake, good boating, good swimming, good fishing.

These days it looks unhealthy, almost out on its feet, leaning up against the ropes. It is actually hard to believe, but I buy what the experts are now telling us. People need water and the water is coming from an aquifer that once had a cozy relationship with the lake, keeping it brimming in good times and allowing it to hold its own in bad times.

That cozy relationship existed before the onset of so much development around the lake, I suppose. As recently as when I was a young curmudgeon in training, going out to the lake still had a rural, up-north feel to it. These days the lake is analogous to a property whose urban owner refused to sell to developers and there it sits, humble against towering and adjoining skyscrapers, an anachronism.

I'm betting there will be a White Bear Lake in the future, but not a 2,400-acre lake. It has already lost a couple of hundred acres to newly exposed shoreline. If you drew a line that cuts the lake in half from west to east, the west side will probably continue to decline. It is shallower on that side, while there remain deep pools on the eastern half of the lake.

Lore has it that a streetcar boat was scuttled between Manitou Island and the peninsula. This was back in the days when the streetcar boats ran on White Bear just like they ran on Minnetonka and where the restored Minnehaha still runs today out of Excelsior.

If that is true and one day that ghostly relic is suddenly seen, well, then, all bets are off. It would have required fairly deep water to scuttle a streetcar boat.